[Obscure Games] Heroes & Heroines

It has been a long time since I've written anything in this series—the last actual review of a game was in May of 2015!—so it is time to dust it off and give some attention to yet another game that hardly anyone has heard of. This time, we're going to address another superhero game, Heroes & Heroines, one of the more ambitious games of the '90s.

In the early '90s, comics had been suffering a bit after the crash of the (mostly) black & white indie comics of the '80s, and mainstream comics were shoveling out increasingly boring storylines. Worse, creators were starting to realize that they deserved a lot more from their creations, both in terms of creative control and financial reward. This led to the rise of "creator-owned" comics, many of them attached to the new publisher Image Comics. In addition, some of the smaller publishers decided to make a bid to take over some of the superhero comics market that was so thoroughly dominated by Marvel and DC. For instance, Dark Horse began its line of "Comics' Greatest World" superhero-comics, and Continuity Comics tried to forge a world by attempting major crossover events between its titles, giving the world the "Deathwatch 2000" and "Rise of Magic" storylines.

Into this ferment stepped a first-time game designer and publisher, James E. Freel III, whose publishing company, Excel Marketing, decided to try to make a splash by licensing as many of these smaller attempts as possible and putting them all into one game system, titled Heroes & Heroines. As the back cover marketing copy said, "No need to buy single or no licensed Comic Book Role Playing Games anymore!" The "single licensed" games that refers to, of course, were the Marvel Superheroes RPG from TSR and DC Heroes from Mayfair Games. The "no licensed" games referred to the likes of Champions and Villains & Vigilantes, or really any other superhero RPG of the time, all of which presented their own settings, unconnected to any actual comic books.

Heroes & Heroines was quickly followed by three supplements, The Maxx, based on the critically-acclaimed book from Image Comics, Deathwatch 2000, which covered the Continuity Comics crossover event featuring the likes of Ms. Mystic, Samuree, Monolith, and so on, and Comic's [sic] Greatest World, adding the characters from Dark Horse's superhero world such as Ghost, Barb Wire, Titan, and Division 13. Unfortunately for me, my ex-wife got The Maxx in the divorce, while I kept the rules, and I never did get either of the other two supplements. I ordered Comic's Greatest World recently from a used book store across the country, but it's still shipping, and it seems that no one in the world is currently offering to sell a copy of The Maxx supplement for the game.

The game itself is surprisingly simple and intuitive. Instead of a "strength" stat, a character is rated for how much weight, in pounds, they can bench press. This isn't really the best choice for an overall strength measure—I'd probably choose overhead press, whether strict press or push press, as a reasonable measure—but it is the one most often used in comic book write-ups when companies publish encyclopedias of their characters, and it's probably fair to estimate overhead press as about 80% of bench press. Intelligence is represented by IQ, which is rated just as real-world IQ tests present their scores, with an average of 100. Other stats don't come from real-world values, but are still fairly simple to eyeball for a given character or person.

Superpowers and skills are similarly straightforward. If a character can teleport, they buy the teleport power. On the other hand, if they pass through dimensions, they buy the dimension travel power. Which costs 5 points less but tells the reader to refer to the teleport power for details, for some reason? OK, the game could really have used some editing and development. Anyway, as noted, characters are designed using a system of points. The extensive list of powers helps in some ways but is a problem in others.

Different powers provide different Attack Ratings, Defense Ratings, and the Mental equivalents. Comparing the Attack Rating of the offensive power to the Defense Rating of the target on a chart gives the chance on 1d20 to succeed in the attack. Damage is subtracted from pools of Hit Points and Mental Hit Points, with a pool being reduced to zero causing the character to fall unconscious, while reducing the Hit Points pool to -8 kills the character. I am not sure why that value instead of, say, -10 or whatever. Taking a large fraction of the character's total Hit Points in one attack has a chance of Stunning the character.

There's not a lot more to the game. At this point in my gaming career, I find that refreshing. I am somewhat attracted to games that are only the barest of frameworks right now. We can point to the original edition of D&D, which was similarly very bare-bones in its approach, relying on rulings by the Referee to handle other situations.

The biggest annoyance with the game, for me, is the lack of editing, which is made worse because Freel is one of those writers who have picked up a lot of very idiosyncratic spellings and usages.